Norman Mailer Quotes

Best Quotes by Norman Mailer (Top 10)

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Norman Mailer
There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
Norman Mailer
You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
Norman Mailer
One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.
Norman Mailer
Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
Norman Mailer
The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one's passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.
Norman Mailer
I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.
Norman Mailer
Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart
Norman Mailer
Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
Norman Mailer
Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon
Norman Mailer

More Norman Mailer Quotes

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
Norman Mailer
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
Norman Mailer
Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.
Norman Mailer
In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.
Norman Mailer
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
Norman Mailer
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
Norman Mailer
I don't trust compliments. I've been getting them for years. Sometimes I deserve them, sometimes I didn't. But generally when people give you compliments there's one of two things wrong with them. Either they're false, or what's worse is they're sincere. They really mean the compliment. And then they're offering you their loyalty. And I'm kind of a stingy... Well, I don't necessarily want to give all that loyalty back. So either way, let's skip the compliments.
Norman Mailer
One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness - the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.
Norman Mailer
There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
Norman Mailer
In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.
Norman Mailer
I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
Norman Mailer
Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
Norman Mailer
Boredom slays more of existence than war.
Norman Mailer
People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.
Norman Mailer
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
Norman Mailer
A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
Norman Mailer